I found a fix to this.
It's not easy, and it's not cheap. But it works!

Wait for it.....

I moved over to Trimble Realworks!

After having been frustrated with the lack of care for the ease of usability being pushed aside to make way for less relevant additions (like the VR Steve mentioned) I bit the bullet and invested time and money (both well spent in hindsight) learning a new software solution. And what a solution it is!
I'm sure the likes of Leica and Cyclone are just as versatile, but I am not too familiar with it, so can't comment.

Bottom line, if you want to focus on registering your scans and complete your project with confidence, go with these packages.
If you want to play around with pretty VR environments and figure out the tolerances of your survey using a ree yellow green traffic light system (I STILL don't quite get how it comes up with some of the results - iv seen a staircase floating between two floors and partially outside and scene gave it the green light- lol) then scene is your tool!

Maybe if they didn't spend their time dicking around with things like VR headsets they could concentrate on fixing the problems with SCENE and do something about the fact that in 6 years we have seen precisely zero functions added that in any way improve productivity.

+1000

Every time a new version comes out I excitedly open up the release notes, "Surely this time they will have fixed some long standing issues or added something to my life better."

Nope, nearly all of the usability issues that existed when I started using Scene back at version 4.8 still exist.

Maybe next year.

I shared the exact same frustration during my previous career as a consultant/service provider.

Now that I am on the inside at FARO, I will aggressively submit a service/update request on everyone's behalf.

There have been several similarly and seemingly minor gripes that I have personally had for a number of years.
Please PM me with yours and I will try and get everything formalized and submitted as higher priority group based input.

Could this be a global setting value that the user could perhaps set in the settings panel for a view that suits each person, rather than a single 50% that people may or may not want to continually change.

For example
when we are scanning in a building we may have scan locations that are very close together and therefore we would set a small manipulator value in this case

There will be a larger overhaul of the manipulators in a future version to make them available for more operations.
Simon: such a setting would be possible. I will use your input in the discussions about the aforementioned implementation!

While we're at it, could we also be able to move the pivot point for the rotation ? For now it's scan/cluster center only. In some cases it is faster to manually adjust the odd scan position than redo the whole registration, and it is inconvenient to do so with the current manipulator.